Autor: Ormerod, Neil

Buch: Creation, Grace, and Redemption

Titel: Creation, Grace, and Redemption

Stichwort: Dialektik: Transzendenz - Begrenzung; kulturelle Werte - D.: kosmologische - anthropologisch fundierte Werte

Kurzinhalt: At the limitation pole of culture ... At the transcendent pole of culture there are anthropologically grounded meanings and values. Such a culture identifies the source of meaning and value in a world-transcendent source, God or reason ... To break ...

Textausschnitt: Cultural Values

62c Cultural values give us the whys and wherefores of our living. They inform us about the direction that can be found or lost in the movement of life. They are mediated to us by the stories, narratives, myths, and legends of the culture. They are discussed and criticized in philosophies, theologies, and cultural journals. They are expressed in art and popularized in the media. They exercise the critical reflective function in a society. Although we may tend to downplay the importance of this type of activity, we should never ignore the sheer power of ideas. Marx's years in the British Museum shaped the history of the twentieth century. Economic rationalism first won a handful of hearts and minds before it gained political ascendancy in Britain and the United States, and so changed the landscape of Western democracies, for better or worse. Still, the time scale of an idea is measured in decades, even centuries, and commonly we tend to undervalue ideas because they lack immediate impact. This neglect is itself an instance of what Lonergan calls "general bias," a bias against the theoretical, the long-term in favor of the practical and short-term.1 It is most evident in the omnicompetent self-assurance of the person of practical common sense who views any theoretical discussion with disdain. (Fs)

63a Doran understands the cultural level as also constituted by a dialectic of transcendence and limitation.2 At the limitation pole of culture Doran speaks of cosmologically grounded meanings and values. These view the world as an ordering that moves from the cosmos, through society, and on to the individual. The individual must align himself or herself with the society, and the society with the cosmos. Thus, for Doran:

Cosmological symbolizations of the experience of life as a movement with a direction that can be found or missed find the paradigm of order in the cosmic rhythms ... Cosmological constitutive meaning has its roots in the affective biologically based sympathy of the organism with the rhythms and process of non-human nature.3
63b The cultures of many indigenous peoples, such as Australian Aborigines, Native Americans, and Innuits, are cosmological in form, as are more recent agrarian societies. These cultures take their orderings from the rhythms of nature, the seasons, the migrations of animal herds, the cycles of planting, harvesting, birth, and death. Until the Enlightenment, cosmological symbolisms made a significant contribution to European cultures in, for example, institutions such as monarchies, which represented for many a cosmological hierarchical ordering our societies. The Christian liturgical cycle reflects elements of this, with Easter linked to the new life of spring, and Christmas marking the depths of winter, when the days begin to lengthen. (Fs)

63c At the transcendent pole of culture there are anthropologically grounded meanings and values. Such a culture identifies the source of meaning and value in a world-transcendent source, God or reason, with which the individual must align himself or herself. Society is then shaped to the needs of such aligned individuals. For an anthropological culture:

the measure of integrity is recognized as world-transcendent and as providing the standard first for the individual, whose ordered attunement to the world-transcendent measure is itself the measure of the integrity of society ... Anthropological truth is ... constitutive of history as the product of human insight, reflection and decision.4
64a Such a cultural breakthrough occurred initially in the Greek philosophical movement and has been part of our Western cultural heritage ever since. It received a major impetus during the Enlightenment and the industrial and scientific revolutions of the modern era. Again, Christianity reflects these meanings and values in its emphasis on personal responsibility in its teachings on free will and sin. (Fs)

64b To break the tension in the direction of cosmological values is to abandon humanity to a cosmologically conceived fate, where human beings are unable to take responsibility for human history. Human history is thought of as the plaything of the gods, of spirits, of "principalities, thrones, and dominations."This is not to say that such societies lack practical intelligence or that they do not change. But the power of their creative intelligence may be hidden from them by the cosmological meanings and values that dominate their lives. Where society must conform to the cosmos and the individual to society, there is little room for the recognition of personal initiative and creativity. (Fs)

64c To break the tension in the direction of anthropological values is to lose touch with the rhythms of cycles of nature, to neglect basic limitations of human existence and hence to ignore long-term issues of cultural and historical survival. At the same time there is a distortion of the transcendent pole of the dialectic that is then conceived in terms of domination and control. Lonergan refers to this distortion as "general bias," which promotes an apocalyptic "longer cycle of decline." Theoretical intelligence is subsumed under the demands of the practical, of the marketplace, of investment and its need for quick returns. Long-term problems that require theoretical investigation are neglected, and the short-term solutions proposed by practical common sense, while superficially effective in the short run, simply create more problems in the long run. The social surd accumulates to such an extent that attempted solutions become more and more desperate. "A civilization in decline digs its own grave with a relentless consistency."5

64c Much of the feminist critique of patriarchy can be read as a critique of a culture that has distorted the cultural dialectic in the direction of anthropological culture, in the direction of transcendence. It is a culture no longer cognizant of limitation, which rejects any constraint on its activities and suppresses our linkage with the rhythms and cycles of the natural order. It has led to the decimation of indigenous peoples and cultures, to exploitation of the land, and to the marginalization of women. (Fs)

65a Our analysis of both liberation and feminist theology in terms of the social and cultural dialectics should alert us to the fact that the dialectic can also be distorted in the other direction, in the direction of limitation. Societies can suppress technological, economic, and political change; they can lock themselves into a cosmological worldview that severely limits the possibilities for the development of human culture. Although this is not a commonly realized possibility, at least in the Western world, it does point to another way in which evil may be manifested in the social and cultural orders of human existence. (Fs)